Question

is there a way to auto-increment the version code each time you build an Android application in Eclipse?

According to http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/versioning.html, you have to manually increment your version code in AndroidManifest.xml.

I understand, you have to run a script before each build which would, e.g. parse AndroidManifest.xml file, find the version number, increment it and save the file before the build itself starts. However, i couldn’t find out how and if Eclipse supports runnings scripts before/after builds.

I have found this article about configuring ant builder, but this is not exactly about Android and I fear this will mess up too much the predefined building steps for Android?

Should be a common problem, how did you solve it?

Well, one can do this manually, but as soon as you forget to do this chore, you get different versions with the same number and the whole versioning makes little sense.

Answer 1

So, I see it like this:

Depending on article that you present, use ant for this tasks (targets?).

1. parse Manifest (parse XML)
2. get old version form manifest and increase it/get version from repo
3. store new version in manifest
4. build android app.

But im my case I usually fill this field by value based on Tag‘s revision when I deploy or distribute application.